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<title>I fall in love just a little ol' little bit (every day with someone new) by ishouldwritethatdown</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25631926">I fall in love just a little ol' little bit (every day with someone new)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown'>ishouldwritethatdown</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Within the Wires (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Ficlet, Gen, Photographs, Photography, Scrapbooks</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 10:26:36</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,083</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25631926</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"But art is often just record keeping, letting us know that an apple looked the same to Cezanne in 1895 as it does to a grocer in 1974. Or a dog in a 15th century tapestry had the same shape and size ratio to humans as one today on Saint Catherine Street right here in Montreal."</i> --Season 2, Cassette #6: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (1978)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Claudia Atieno/Roimata Mangakāhia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>I fall in love just a little ol' little bit (every day with someone new)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Title is lyrics from Hozier's 'Someone New'. I was looking at old family photographs when I got inspired to write this.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Roimata curated her photo albums carefully. She found that photography was like painting in many ways. Even the most abstract painting shared things in common with a photograph, be it a portrait, a landscape, or anything else – they both had the ability to evoke emotion in the viewer, the sense that a moment is being shared by the artist as they experience it. Even in a crowded gallery, engaging with a piece of art can foster a sense of intimacy, of <em>connection</em>, that she deeply valued.</p><p>Like sketches, paintings, models, sculptures – any kind of art you could think of – there were functional photographs. Photos of archaeological dig sites, and crime scenes. Photographic evidence. The stiff family portraits where the parents held onto their children to stop them from ruining their best clothes before the picture could be taken, they were functional. Some might even say they were artless. But Roimata saw the children who were trying to learn how to smile on command, and she was reminded of the Programming Centre. Tactile retraining and eye tests and physical exams. Trying to learn how to use your body, make it obey you. Art was about human connection, and she felt connected to the children of times past who, if they lived through the Reckoning, would certainly be older than her by now.</p><p>And then there were the parents, with the old society’s ideals of tribalism and nuclear families so ingrained that they had had no choice but fill the roles that had been made for them. The exhaustion behind their eyes as they tried to summon the patience, wisdom, and strength of will that everybody agreed was hard work to cultivate, in order to raise their children to the best of their ability. Their society had robbed them of the ability to choose how to build their family except to their rigid specifications. Roimata related to that, too.</p><p>So she had an album full of family portraits, from the genuine smiles to the tantrumming toddlers to the forcibly neutral. But she had another album, of a much rarer kind of photo. She suspected that these pieces were so much harder to find because at the time, they had been regarded as junk. Many would probably think the same now, but to her they were the most precious of discoveries.</p><p>Yes, she felt a connection to families past despite their static stances, forced smiles, lack of creativity. But it was nothing compared to how she felt when she found photographs of people living candidly. Not the false candidity of celebrities in magazines or other artists in the Cornwall House when they realised they were being painted. This was the barest face of humanity – people blinking at the wrong moment, spilling their drink seconds before the shutter closed. Moments of adoration or horror on faces while the object of their attention remains utterly oblivious. Blurry shots of running children, hastily captured images that would have been beautiful if only the subject were in focus, snaps of people’s feet as they’re winding the film. Bad framing, bad lighting, tongues halfway to licking lips and hair blowing suddenly across faces. A lot of her favourites she thought were probably taken by children; one seemed to be a child who had held the lens up to their eye instead of the viewpoint and got a nasty surprise from the flash.</p><p>She wished she could thank the people who had developed some of the photos in this collection, perhaps carelessly or perhaps with the same love that she now collected them. It was quite a slow-growing album, but a few months after she had unofficially moved into the Cornwall House full-time, she had found a spool of fixed film. She had had to ask a photographer friend of Claudia’s, Leslie, if she could borrow her dark room and developing equipment. Some of it was damaged, but for some of the photos, it added character. She didn’t only get the pretty photos that people put in photoframes, but all of the mistakes, the slips of the finger. If Leslie judged Roimata for her photo choices, she never said so, and offered to let her use the dark room if she ever needed it again. Roimata had sent her a bottle of wine as a thank-you, and a few weeks later, she had received printed copies of all of the photos she had taken at the last Cornwall party she was at.</p><p>The modern photos were more reliably in colour than the old ones. They were less grainy, and the focal settings of Leslie’s upmarket photographer’s camera (as well as a professional photographer’s skills behind it) made a huge difference. Roimata had rearranged her album almost at once. She matched photos with each other, treating the impromptu compositions of each as artistic intent, as if she were arranging an exhibit. Side by side, it was easy to see that however much the Reckoning had changed things, people were still people. They made the same mistakes with their equipment, behaved just as awkwardly when they knew there was a camera on them. Roimata had had to dab her eyes with her sleeve to stop her tears from ruining the present.</p><p>She matched a blurry photo of two children running with the rampage of the Pekingese that some ill-advised guest had unleashed on the party. A spilling drink from the old photos to a wine stain and a guilty face from the new. Blurry kisses and bad dancing and make-up smudges. Unrestrained smiles, snoring faces, people turning and seeing the camera pointed at them too late to compose themselves, but too early to appear candid. Floorboards and photos of a dark sky, and lens flares that hide people’s faces.</p><p>Near the bottom of the stack, there was a photo of Roimata herself, lifting her wine glass out of the way of a pair of people who were blurry and drunk and not very good at dancing. Almost at the very edge of the frame, she could see Claudia, with her eyes full of the utmost tenderness. She was looking at Roimata.</p><p>She spent some time trying to decide the best place for the photo. In the end, she put it at the very back of the album, taking the whole back cover for itself. On the front page of the inside of the album, she finally came to a decision about its name.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Accidental Love Stories<br/>(a study in capturing human connection on film)</em>
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